On June 9-11 at the How Class Works conference hosted at SUNY Stony Brook, the Working-Class Studies Association will recognize the best new work in the field. In this week’s Working-Class Perspectives post, former WCSA President Christie Launius previews the pieces that have made a profound contribution to working-class literature.

The winner of this year’s Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing is Voices from the Appalachian Coalfields, by Mike and Ruth Yarrow, with photographs by Douglas Yarrow, published by Bottom Dog Press. The book is comprised of “found” poems created by the Yarrows based on interviews conducted during the late 1970s with Appalachian coal miners (both men and women) and their spouses. In her author’s statement, Ruth Yarrow explains that the book “is written as found poems because Mike realized that the interviews revealed strong emotions, rhythmic phrases and vivid storytelling skills that could be poetry.” One judge noted that though the interviewees’ voices are edited into poems, “they retain their authenticity and power.”

Great effort is made here to document and preserve the work and the voices of the workers and their families in this time and place. One judge wrote that these poems “beautifully convey life in the mines and on picket lines, showing the eloquence of the speech of working people. These pieces present the poetry of everyday life and present all the pain, resilience, bravery, humanity and aspiration of poetry crafted by poets. This book is a real and lasting contribution to working-class literature.” Another wrote that the book “captures both regional culture and working-class culture in all its emotional complexity through the competing voices.”

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

Recent changes in higher education have had a profound impact on academics who come from working-class backgrounds. In this week’s Working-Class Perspectives post, Sherry Linkon contemplates the class divides in working-class studies and what two new volumes suggest about the visibility and impact of the field.

While these new volumes raise questions about the impact of Working-Class Studies, they also suggest three important insights for the field. First, sadly, even after decades of discussion, higher education remains divided along class lines, and academics from the working class still feel alienated and frustrated. Indeed, changes in higher education have made the problems worse, as too many working-class academics find themselves caught in part-time or short-term teaching jobs, unable to break through the class barriers that seem to preserve most tenure-line jobs for people from professional class backgrounds. We also see the class hierarchies of higher education in the struggle of state universities to survive continuing budget cuts and attacks on tenure, even as elite private schools compete to see who can raise tuition the most while keeping acceptance rates the lowest. Far from being resolved, class divisions in higher education have gotten worse, despite the more visible presence of academics from the working class and efforts to increase and deepen attention to class in both the curriculum and research.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University professor of English, Sherry Linkon, who authored this piece. It features several other regular and guest contributors.

We have a lot to learn from working-class students, who face unique challenges in higher education. As Tim Strangleman points out in this week’s Working-Class Perspectives post, students who are invited to analyze their work experiences deepen their learning and provide new insights for faculty, as well.

This year I had three great examples, all from working-class women, which I know I will use as examples for future students for years to come. One of the essays reflected on working in a bar. While there was some discussion of pulling pints and replenishing stock, the student focused on the casual everyday sexism of her managers and especially the regulars she served. She offered a litany of examples of comments, wise-cracks, and leers that are part and parcel of an ordinary contemporary workplace. She described how she tried to ignore comments from men waiting to be served, the advice that she might want to ‘cheer up’ after failing to laugh at their jokes, or the older man who called her ‘daughter’ but then ogled her while she bent down to refill the ice box. Her description was shocking and chilling in equal measure. Another student described working in a women’s fashion shop. She recounted having to face the Monday morning blues and the prospect of another week at work, traveling in on the train, being told by her boss to remember ‘that smile’, and dealing with one difficult customer after another.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

When 96 football fans in Great Britain were unlawfully killed in a 1989 disaster, police and media covered up the negligence of senior police officers and laid the blame on working-class supporters. Twenty-seven years later, the truth exonerates the supporters from any responsibility for the tragedy. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Andy Clark recounts the grassroots campaign that led to justice for the Hillsborough victims.

What followed was one of the most extensive cover-ups and miscarriages of justice in British legal history. Minutes after the crush began, South Yorkshire Police had begun to concoct a version of events that would lay the blame fully with the supporters. Witnesses and relatives of the dead were interviewed as if they were criminals. The emerging narrative described the supporters as drunk, violent thugs who failed to comply with police orders to move back and form an orderly queue.

The coverup of the Hillsborough tragedy was part of a sustained attack on working-class communities and culture throughout the 1980s. The local police knew that their lies would prevail, because of their role in the government’s class war on working-class communities. They had become increasingly militarised during the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, and they and the Thatcher government had won a number of key battles.

The war on the working class extended to football– the working person’s game. Following a 1985 stadium fire in Bradford that led to the deaths of 56 supporters, an editorial in the Sunday Times called football “a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people”. Such rhetoric also appeared after Hillsborough, most infamously in another Rupert Murdoch publication, The Sun, which emblazoned its front page with the claim, from unnamed police sources, of ‘THE TRUTH: Some fans picked pockets of victims; Some fans urinated on the brave cops; Some fans beat up PCs giving the kiss of life’.

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

A study finding increased mortality for the white working-class drew a lot of attention last fall. Yet as Jack Metzgar demonstrates in this week’s Working-Class Perspectives post, the focus on race obscures some important class-based patterns.

Janell Ross recently provided a thorough rundown of black-white disparities in The Washington Post: “On just about every measure of social or economic well-being, white Americans fare better than any other group. That’s true of housing and neighborhood quality and homeownership. That’s true of overall health, health insurance coverage rates, quality of health care received, life expectancy and infant mortality. That’s true when it comes to median household earnings, wealth (assets minus debt), retirement savings and even who has a bank account.” Ross’s bouquet of links, based on very solid sources, documents an appalling degree of racial injustice, especially toward blacks. But, unlike Case and Deaton, these sources all compare the entire white population with the entire black and Hispanic populations, with no internal differentiation. As with death rates, all these disparities might look very different in a five-category comparison like Case and Deaton use. I’m betting, for example, that whites with only high school educations or less have nowhere near the “typical” white family’s wealth of $131,000. Routinely differentiating the white population by educational attainment would not show that we overestimate racial injustice, but it would almost certainly show that we grossly underestimate class injustice.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

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